Monopolies

[Audrie Krause <audrie@netaction.org>]

Lewis,

According to the SF Chronicle, AT&T has two competitors laying fiber in SF
in order to offer cable Internet access.  Since I'm neither a lawyer nor an
economist, I'm not an expert in monopolies.  But it seems to me that if
there are three companies providing the same service, one of them can't be
a monopoly.  And, as Joe Shea points out, there is also DSL and wireless.
In SF, SBC/PacBell has at least two competitors already selling DSL to
consumers.  So there, too, consumers have choices.

Oh, and it is *not* my position that broadband access should be sold only
by local monopolies.  Those are  your words, not mine.

Audrie Krause


>Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 07:31:45 -0700
>From: "Lewis A. Mettler" <lmettler@lamlaw.com>
>To: antitrust@essential.org
>Subject: Re: M$ Monitor: Why You Haven't Heard From Us
>Message-ID: <37A065D1.4E3FF3B9@lamlaw.com>
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>Audrie,
>
>Your stand on suggesting that broadband access should be sold only by
>local monopolies is short sighted.
>
>Consumers simply do not want to be limited to only two choices for high
>speed internet access (i.e. the local cable monopoly and DSL).  That is
>a ridiculous suggestion.
>
>Right now consumers have a choice of 3 or 4 or more ISPs who can provide
>comparable service.
>
>Your stand would cut that down to perhaps one or two based upon who owns
>the wires.
>
>That solution will never serve consumers.

--
Audrie Krause  <<NetAction>>  E-MAIL: audrie@netaction.org
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